Peter Junger
More info
- Occupation
- Law professor, Case Western Reserve University
- Known for
- Junger v. Daley (2000)
- Died
- 2006
The law professor who wanted to post encryption code on his course website and got a federal appeals court to rule that source code is speech.
Junger taught computer law at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio. In the 1990s strong cryptography counted as munitions in the US, and publishing encryption programs online could amount to illegal export — even if the audience was just his own students, some of whom happened to be foreign. In 1996 he sued the government for the right to do it anyway.
The district court ruled against him in 1998, reasoning that source code is primarily functional. In April 2000 the Sixth Circuit reversed: because source code is an expressive means of exchanging ideas about programming, it is protected by the First Amendment. The ruling landed just as the export rules were being relaxed anyway, but alongside Bernstein's case it became a cornerstone of the crypto wars. Junger died in 2006.